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Written on 6/19/2012 at 6:04 am by Guest Blogger

10 Cheap Survey Tools for Bloggers Who Want Answers

This guest post is by Neil Patel of Quick Sprout.

Whether you want to write a persuasive post or a headline that grabs attention, or create a call to action that grows your RSS subscription count by 243%, you first have to understand who your reader is.

So how do you go about finding this out?

You could guess, measure, and repeat until you hit upon a winning formula … but that could take months or years.

The easiest and fastest way to find out what will resonate with your readers is to ask them. And the best to do that is with a survey.

How can surveys help you?

You probably have a good working understanding of who your readers are because of your experience in the field. This will help you create surveys, but it won’t help you get to those breakthrough insights that will turn your posts into reader magnets.

To do that you need to know information like this:

Demographics: A survey will tell you who’s reading your blog. It can tell you their sex, age, income, and interests.
Content: A survey will tell you what kinds of content your readers like. Do they like practical articles or more research-based posts? Do they want those to be long or short? What about frequency?
Products: A survey will also tell you what kinds of products your readers may be interested in.
Problems: Finally, a survey can tell you what problems that your readers want solved. This is probably the best piece of information you could have when it comes to creating engaging content, right?

Top survey tools

AJ showed how to create a survey that gets insightful answers from your readers earlier today.

Now, let’s look at some in expensive tools that will help you gather this all-important information professionally and securely.

Comments

One of the simplest ways to get feedback from readers is to write a post with survey-like questions, and then ask your readers to respond in the comments.

There are some disadvantages to this approach. For example, because people are free to say anything they want in the comments, it may be hard to get the exact information you want.

Also, with this approach, the survey responses are out in the open, and this may suppress the response since people may be a little timid to share information so publicly.

What I’ve found about using comments for surveys is that this approach is perfect for simple questions like “What was the worst work experience you ever had?” If you want something more specific, then you need to use one of the tools we’ll look at next.

WP-Polls

Using a WordPress plugin like WP-Polls on your blog will give you the option of asking very specific questions that should generate very specific answers over an extended amount of time.

This plugin is embedded on your site as a widget, and actually adds another element of interaction with your readers. Every month, you can change the questions.

The nice thing about WordPress plugins is that they’re simple to install from inside your WP admin control panel.

Google Docs

Google Docs offers a tool that will help you create surveys that you can link readers to (for example, in an email), or actually embed into your blog.

It creates these forms out of HTML, gives you several survey styles, and even gives you a huge selection of themes to choose from:

This is the form that Chris Brogan uses:

On the back end, you can review the collected data in a charts and graphs:

Survey Monkey

Survey Monkey is the most well-known survey tool online, having been around since 2002.

While there are paid plans that won’t bankrupt you, I’ve found that the free online version suits most of my needs. The only drawback to this type of survey is that it will drive your readers away from your site, as they need to go to Survey Monkey to give their answers.

The service gives you a choice of 15 question styles to choose from.

And you can even customize the survey to match your blog color scheme.

KISSinsights

This tool is one my team developed. KISSinsights is a simple tool that takes two minutes to install, and allows you to ask one question of your readers. You can update that question at any time.

What I really like about this survey tool is that we tried to make it as little a distraction from your site as possible: it pops up, but then the user can close it and move on to your site immediately.

WP Survey and Quiz Tool

This robust WordPress tool, WP Survey and Quiz Tool, will let you do more than just create surveys—as the name suggests, you can also use it to create quizzes and polls.

There is no limit to the number of surveys or quizzes you can create, and the tool gives you these features as well:

Limit answers to one per IP address.
Send customized notification emails.
Send notification emails to one email address or a group of WordPress users.
Create custom contact forms.
Export your surveys and quizzes.

The drawback to this tool is that your survey is limited to s single post—it’s not available site-wide.

WordPress Simple Survey

The jQuery-based WordPress survey tool Simple Survey will allow you to create basic weighted surveys that route users to a location based upon their survey “score.”

The page doesn’t need to be reloaded as the user progresses through the quiz:

You can have results emailed to you, or you can simply login into your WordPress dashboard to see the results.

SodaHead Polls

SodaHead gives you great options for customizing and publishing polls. In addition, you can:

add videos and photos
add questions with more than ten choices
protect against voting fraud with a Flash-based security code.

The feature that I really like about this tool is what it can do to help your poll go viral through features like one-click sharing to Twitter and Yahoo, and adding your survey to SodaHead’s network to get more exposure.

Polldaddy Polls and Ratings

This fully customizable survey tool for WordPress gives you the ability to post your poll on a single post or as a sidebar widget:

The nice thing about Polldaddy Polls is that it supports 57 different languages, making it a better option for those serving audiences outside of the United States.

Unfortunately if you have the latest WordPress update, 3.3.2, then it may not be compatible with your site.

Survey Me

For the people who don’t code out there, SurveyMe is probably the WordPress plugin you want to use.

This simple install will allow you to role out a poll within minutes.

Maximizing responses

By the way, if you are concerned about how many responses you’ll get to your survey, don’t worry. People love to share their opinions—you’ll probably get as high as a ten percent turnout!

If you are interested in getting an even higher response, I’d recommend you tell your readers that you’re going to share some of the best responses that you get from the survey. With a promise that they might get some exposure on your site, more people will be motivated to leave a response.

If you want an even higher turnout, or if you have a small audience and want to maximize the number of answers you receive, you may want to offer some kind of incentive (for example, everyone who responds will be entered in a drawing for a $50 Apple iTunes gift card).

What survey tools do you use? Tell us your faves in the comments.

Neil Patel is an online marketing consultant and the co-founder of KISSmetrics. He also blogs at Quick Sprout.

Written on 6/13/2012 at 12:07 am by Darren Rowse

The Blogger’s Essential WordPress Guide: 13 Top Tutorials

Filed Under: Blog Networks, Featured Posts

Over the last couple of months, we’ve taken a close look at WordPress here on ProBlogger.

I know that many readers do use WordPress—either the free or paid version—and it’s the content management system of choice for many high-profile sites. I’ve been using it for years, and I’d have to say that it’s served me really well over that time.

The articles we’ve published have covered many of the essential aspects of blogging using WordPress, from choosing the service that’ll suit you and weighing up different themes, to securing, posting to, and making money from your WordPress blog.

In case you’ve missed any of these great posts, I thought I’d compile them all here for easy reference.

Getting started

Thanks to all the contributors who put in the work to help us get our heads around these finer points of WordPress, including Matt Hooper, Karol K of ThemeFuse, Anurag Bansal of Techacker, Eric Siu of Evergreen Search, Louise of MoneySupermarket.com, and Sean Platt of outstandingSETUP.

Of course, while this CMS dominates the blogosphere, there are many solid alternatives to WordPress (and no, I’m not talking about Blogger!). If you’re looking for a change for some reason, give them your consideration.

Do you have a favourite WordPress tutorial or resource that you can add to this list? Share it with us in the comments.

Written on 6/2/2012 at 12:03 am by Guest Blogger

Boost Conversions Step 4: Run A/B Tests, Tweak, and Refine

Filed Under: Miscellaneous Blog Tips

This guest post is by the Web Marketing Ninja.

When it comes to conversion rate optimization, it’s easy to read about, and think about.

But when it comes to actually running a test, most people are at a loss.

It’s not that we don’t believe in testing; it’s that there’s barely enough time in the day to set up those key pages once, let alone set up variants, implement a test, measure, refine the pages, and test again. Trust me—I’ve been there!

But as we’re nearing the end of this series of posts about boosting conversions, I’m hoping you’re all fired up!

I’m going to use that motivation to push you to finally run that first test—a simple A/B test. In this post, I’ll run you , step by step, through a simple test that:

won’t cost you a cent
takes less than an hour of your time to set up
gives you that all-important glimpse of what testing can actually do for your blog.

I’ll bet once you’ve cracked that first A/B testing nut, you’ll become a testing junkie like me. And your conversion rates with never be the same—hopefully, they’ll be much better!

So let’s get testing.

1. Choosing a page

First things first—let’s pick a page to test.

In the second post in this series, Darren talked about reviewing your conversion funnel. That may have given you a few ideas about pages you could test—maybe they’re some of the pages you reworked after reading Tommy’s post yesterday.

My basic approach is, if you’ve got a sales or signup page that gets traffic, test that. (It’s likely to be on your list anyway.) If you don’t, pick your Contact page instead. Or, if you’re feeling brave you can go for the biggest bang for buck and test a “money page.”

2. Working out what to test

Our second step is to figure out what to test. When I’m looking at a page I want to test for the first time, I ask these six questions:

Can everyone access it? We’re talking here about accessibility.
Can everyone use it? Usability is the key for complex processes.
Does it work? It should—on all browsers, mobile devices, non-javascript browsers, and so on. Don’t forget to consider page load speeds as well.
How does it look? Does is communicate the mood you want it to?
How well does is tell the story? Do the words engage users and drive the actions you want?

Ask these questions about any web page. and you’ll end up with a long list of stuff you can test, but for now, let’s start with a headline—a big part of telling the story, and probably a fairly strong element in any sales or signup conversion. It’s also something that Tommy was eager to test yesterday, in his third conversion goal, which was to get more high-quality leads.

As this is an A/B test, you need to come up with just one alternative to the page’s original headline. If one email can have over 500 different subject lines then I think we can probably come up with one.

Now we’ve got a page, we’ve got our original headline, and we’ve got an alternative headline. Let’s start our test!

3. Setting up the test

You can use a few different applications to run web page tests—some free, some not. To keep things simple, we’ll use Google Website Optimiser—one of the free options.

In order to use this tool, we first need to set up a couple of things.

We need a publicly viewable version of your original page, and the one you want to test with the new headline. And you’ll need them at two separate URLS—it might be problogger.net/salespage.php and problogger.net/salespage1.php. These URLS will depend on the CMS or blog technology you’re using and your site structure, of course.
We need access to a page that appears aftera user completes your goal action. So, in the case of a contact form, this page would be your “thanks, your message has been received” conformation page.If you’re testing a sales page, this can be a little more tricky. Ideally you’d have access to the page that confirms that the user’s purchase has been successful. If you can’t access that page, you might have to settle for the page that appears when someone clicks on of your Buy Now links.(Note that there are ways around this problem, however you might need some technical assistance to access them. In this case, I would recommend you look at a service like Optimizely/, but it’s not cheap. The upside is that once you set it up, creating tests is extremely easy.)

Once you’ve got all of that done, sign up to Website Optimiser. Once you’ve signed up you should see a page like the one below. Click the link to start your experiment.

You’ll then be asked what type of test you want to run. Pick the A/B Test.

You’ll then be asked to get your test pages and your conversion page ready. We’ve already done that, so we can confirm and move to the next step.

Next, you’ll need to enter a name.

Include the links to the original page, and the version you want to test.

Finally, paste in the link to your goal or conversion page.

Once you’ve completed all the fields, click Continue.

The next step is the most technical. You need to put a special piece of code into your original page, your test page, and your conversion page. (You can read more about the code snippets themselves here.)

If you’re using WordPress, there’s a handy plugin that will allow you to do this pretty easily, called Google Website Optimizer for WordPress.

Once it’s activated you’ll see a spot under each page and post to enable testing—add your special code in there. If you’re confident with editing the tags on particular pages, great. If you’re not using WordPress, you’re not technically minded, and you can’t find a Website Optimizer plugin for your CMS, you might need to ask nicely for some help.

I’m going to move on, assuming that you’ve got the codes in place. Next, you’ll need to validate them:

If the validation’s all good, you’ll get a screen that looks like this:

Click OK, then click Next. You’ll arrive at the final conformation screen, where you can preview or start your experiment.

Once you hit Start, you can sit back and relax for a bit: you’re now testing! After a few hours some of your preliminary results will start to come through. When you log into Website Optimizer you should see your experiment listed. To see the results, click on the View Report link. The report shows you how the two pages are performing against each other.

4. Deciding the winner

You can expect to see some wild fluctuations in the data initially, so it’s important not to decide on a winner to quickly—let the data smooth out over time. In the case shown above, the results came in pretty even—and this is a test I ran over four months!

Most testing platforms will have an algorithm to let you know how confident they are that one version is beating another. In the case of Website Optimizer, it’s called a “high-confidence winner.” In the case of slight changes, it can take a while for a call to be made. You can either wait, or pick your own moment and move on. It’s really up to you.

Personally, I’ve made calls on tests that have only run for three days, and waited for some that have run over months and months. As your experience in testing grows, so will your confidence in making calls.

What to expect from your test

Within your tests, you’ll probably experience one of three things:

Your new headline wins.
Your original headline wins.
The result is too close to tell.

In the first case, you’ve hopefully got a great understanding of the progress you can make with testing.

If your original headline wins, you’ve actually also made a small step forward: you’ve proven that your current headline is better than at least one other option—but I’m sure there’s a bunch more to try!

If it’s a to close to tell results, then, as is the case if the original wins, it’s time to think up some new headlines.

So hopefully you’re all able to identify, set up, run, and report on a simple A/B test. Even better, I hope you’ve found it so easy that you’re ready and raring to start your next test. Because if you’re happy with good, then produce. But if you aspire to great, then produce, test, iterate, test again—and you just might get there.

And that’s the key point here: to continuously improve your blog’s conversion rates for paid or unpaid offers, you really need to have in place an ongoing system of refinement that’s based on trial and testing.

Once you’ve got a handle on that, you’ll be able to go back and apply the four steps for boosting conversions—reviewing your offer, revisiting your conversion funnel, revamping your communications, and running A/B tests—more broadly, to every segment of your audience. That’s what we’ll be looking at later today, in the final part of this series. Don’t miss it!

Stay tuned for more posts by the Web Marketing Ninja—author of The Blogger’s Guide to Online Marketing, and a professional online marketer for a major web brand. Follow the Web Marketing Ninja on Twitter.

Written on 6/1/2012 at 12:01 am by Guest Blogger

Boost Conversions Step 3: Revamp Your Communications

Filed Under: Miscellaneous Blog Tips

This guest post is by Tommy Walker of Tommy.ismy.name.

“How do I get more people to interact with my stuff?”

It’s a question I ask myself constantly. I could go on all day about traffic strategies, guest posting, or any number of online marketing topics. But the truth is, at the end of the day, shares, subscribes, and leads, are just another conversion.

I wish I realized that when I designed my existing website. I wish I realized a lot of things when I designed my website.

See, when I first started my site, I hadn’t thought about things like list building, or selling things (I had nothing to sell) or even the type of content I was going to publish. I thought I’d figure that stuff out as I went along, but, as my style changed, every new thing started to feel like it was tacked on.

Sadly, my site has become this clumsy Frankenstein creature that haphazardly attempts to do my bidding, but never quite executes. That’s no discredit to my developer, who did an excellent job at the time. It was my own misguided direction that turned what could have been a beautiful creation into something hideous.

Learn from your mistakes

If you’ve been following this series over the last couple of days, you’ll know that we’ve talked a lot about learning from your mistakes—as they affect your free or paid offer, and your conversion funnel.

I worked through these processes myself, so that as I go to work on version 3.0 of my website, I know exactly what I want my conversion goals to be. And they’ll be reflected in every facet of the new design.

The new design isn’t yet operational, but if you’ll allow me to let you peek under the sheet, I’ll show you:

my conversion goals
how I plan to attack them
screenshots of the current design and what isn’t working.
screens of the new design and why I think it’s an improvement
what I plan to test.

Expect this post to be on the longer side, as it is meant to be a conversion-oriented website playbook. For your convenience, here’s a table of contents:

Become really friendly with your analytics
Define your conversion goals early

Goal 1: Get more social shares
Goal 2: Increase email subscriber base

Plan 1: Persistent navigation
Plan 2: Optimize homepage for conversions

Homepage Subgoal: Bring users further down the rabbit hole

Plan 3: Optimize underused pages

About page
The footer
End-of-post pages

Plan 4: The dreaded popup

Goal 3: Get More High Quality Leads
Test. Get Feedback. Iterate.

As we go through each section, I’ll also point out things to look out for on your own site, and ways that you might be able to fix them.

A quick note before we continue: Conversion optimization is about constant testing. Everything from copy, to layouts and button placement, and color schemes.

While I might give you some suggestions along the way, there is no one “surefire” way. Often times what works best†is the thing we least expect and if sell yourself short on your testing, you may never know what actually works best for you.

The Web Marketing Ninja will be showing us the complete process of setting up and running A/B (or split) tests tomorrow, so if you want some expert advice on that topic, stay tuned.

Become really friendly with your analytics

Now, before I get to the design, I want to dive deep into my analytics.

As we’ve seen over the last couple of days, patterns in the data give a great starting point for the areas of your conversion funnel that can be improved, and even provide hints for how to improve them.

For instance:

Posts designed to drive conversation and high “time on site,” but which have few shares or interactions, may be lacking a clear sharing mechanism; alternatively, the comment call to action may be lacking.
Sidebar offers that receive traffic, but don’t convert, may need to be redesigned or scrapped entirely.
Landing pages with high time but few conversions require further testing to improve conversions.
Common click paths users take can determine pages that could be optimized for subscriptions or sales.

Your analytics tell the story of you and your users. When you fix your part, they’ll be able to give you more of what you want.

Define your conversion goals early

I imagine we’re a lot alike, you and I, in our goals. Mine are:

get more social shares
build a bigger subscriber base
attract more qualified leads that can be turned to sales.

What I didn’t realize on the first two iterations of my website was that each goal can be attacked very strategically within the design.

So instead of trying to get every page to do every thing, as I create version 3.0 of my website, I will be looking at each aspect with a different conversion goal in mind.

Goal #1: Get more social shares

The first goal, get more social shares, is pretty straightforward.

According to my analytics, my weekly blog articles get the most steady traffic and the highest time on site (four to seven minutes; I primarily video blog).

Knowing that, I want that traffic to turn into more traffic, because right now, the social sharing on the site is low.

With the time on site being so high, my best guess is the posts aren’t getting shared because the sharing functions are a little less than obvious.

The trick to getting more social shares is two-layered.

Create engaging content.
Make sharing as painless as possible.

According to my video analytics, just over 70% of people watch my videos through to the very end. Looking at the current design however, it’s incredibly clear that sharing is not painless.

To address this in the new design, on an individual post page, the video will be featured at the top, filling most of the screen, and the sharing icons will be featured on the bottom left, just before the fold.

Next to the share icons will be a short link that can be copied to the clipboard with a single click.

Next to that, I’ll show a Share Via Email button that, when clicked, will drop down an email form where users can email the page link without ever leaving the site.

Key takeaway:

To improve shares on individual blog posts, create excellent content, and make sharing the primary call to action.

If the sidebars on your individual pages aren’t selling products, or bringing in email subscribers, get rid of those calls to action.

Something you can do right now is install the ShareThis hovering share bar and have it appear on all of your sharable content pages.

What I’ll be testing:

In order to get maximum shares, I’ll need make sure the sharing icons are in the most optimal positions on the page.

My tests will include:

the share icons being located on the left of the page (as pictured)
share icons on the right of the page
the “share bar” taking up the full width of the page below the video.

To do this, I’ll have my developer run a test using Google Website Optimizer, and track the results. (As I mentioned, the Ninja will show you how to do this yourself tomorrow). The layout with the most shares will win.

Goal #2: Increase email subscriber base

There are a few ways I plan to build my email list. Pay close attention here, because each and every one of these ideas is something you can do, too.

Email subscriber plan 1

The first tactic is persistent navigation throughout the site. This feature allows the top navigation bar on your site to remain in view as the user scrolls down the page. With persistent navigation, the fundamental action points are always in view, and available to users.

Persistent navigation seems to be where forward thinking websites are headed (Facebook, Google+, Lifehacker, WordPress). Using persistent navigation through my site allows me to create a subtle call to action that stays with the user.

On the above image, you may have noticed the word “subscribe” in the navigation bar.

I believe this will eliminate the need to create a big, obtrusive opt-in form to occupy the sidebar (but this will need to be tested, of course).

When the user hovers over the “subscribe” button, a dropdown with an opt-in form will appear:

In my opinion, this makes the website a little more “fun” to interact with, which leads me to believe this will increase actual engagement with the site, and, thereby, email subscriptions.

Key takeaway:
The web is evolving much faster than most people realize. Incorporating elements like persistent navigation and interactive elements gives your website more depth than text and images alone. The more you give your users to “play” with, the more likely they will want to hang around on your blog, and hear more from you.

If you’re code junkie, this tutorial will teach you how to create your own persistent navigation menu.

Or, if you’re afraid of code (like me), you could always install the Hello Bar. While it’s not as full-featured as custom navigation, it has been proven to increase clickthrough rates for many of its users, and can be very effective when you use the right messaging.

What I’ll be testing:
I’ll test the messaging within the dropdown itself: “New episodes every week + exclusive bonuses” with “Submit” or “Subscribe” as the call to action, vs. “Learn online marketing and get exclusive bonuses” with “Teach Me!” as the call to action.

Email subscriber plan 2

According to my analytics, my homepage is usually the second stop people make when visiting my site … makes sense.

Sadly, also according to my analytics, this is where my traffic goes to die. My homepage isn’t really optimized for anything.

Realistically, my conversion goals for this new homepage have to be two-fold:

Capture users’ email addresses.
Pull people deeper into the content.

To capture email addresses, I’ll be using a slightly modified approach to the ever popular Halpern Header on my homepage.

Instead of using a static image, however, there will be a welcome video that’ll introduce visitors to the site and talk about the exclusive bonuses that come from being an Inside The Mind subscriber.

I believe that combining the Halpern Header with video will make the email subscription call to action both unmissable and fun to interact with.

As long as I’m able to clearly communicate the benefits of being a subscriber, I think this will lift subscription conversions dramatically.

Key takeaway:

The homepage is often the second most visited page on your website. If you’re not maximizing your email efforts here, first time visitors may never return. This is why it’s important to clearly communicate the benefits of your site, and make your opt-in form highly visible, not banished to your sidebar.

The Halpern Header/feature box method has been proven as an effective way to increase email subscriptions, for some by as much as as 51.7%.

Adding a personal touch like video or an image of yourself can build trust with your potential subscriber, increasing your conversion rates even more.

What I’ll be testing:

While I have a hunch that a welcome video will work well, it’s also possible people might find it more distracting than welcoming.

For that reason I’ll be testing a welcome video vs a welcoming image. I’ll also be testing layout with the video/image orientation on the left vs. the right, the copy, and the call to action.

Homepage Subgoal: Bring visitors further down the rabbit hole

Sadly, after visiting my homepage, most people drop off the site.

To address this, I will feature a scroller of randomized content from season one of my video stream directly underneath the feature box.

The reason for randomization is that it’ll mean that deeper (or older) content can also get some play.

Copyblogger uses a similar approach with the “popular articles” list on their sidebar. Using randomization, a fun slider, and engaging thumbnails for the posts just takes that idea a step further.

Note: The bar will never show posts that are also displayed in the main feed below. Rather it will only show content from deeper pages. This way, I can avoid duplicate content issues—I won’t be trying to push the same article in a handful of different ways.

Below that, I’ll show a fairly standard format blog, with reverse chronological posts on one side, and an offer for my ebook on the other.

You may notice that everything seems to get a little bigger once we get into the main feed. The reason for that is fairly simple. The top of the site will act like a built-in landing page, but once a visitor goes below the fold, the focus will be on content.

The sidebar will display only two items at any given time, and will also be a persistent part of the interface once a certain scroll threshold is reached.

At the top, I’ll include a lead generation piece/ethical bribe (more on this later). Underneath that, a randomly generated episode link will appear (again, only one that is not currently present on the page).

Key takeaway:

If your homepage isn’t working to drive people back into your content, switch things up using your analytics as a guide. Just be sure to talk about it before hand so your faithful visitors don’t think something bad happened to you!

What I’ll be testing:

Not much here actually, but I will be measuring pretty heavily what content, in what position, gets the most clicks.

As far as I know, this is nothing remotely close to a “standard” blog format, so it will be interesting to see how people respond to features like the scroller and persistent navigation.

Email subscriber plan 3

Taking another leaf out of Derek Halpern’s book, I will have email optins in three critical places:

the About page
the footer
at the end of the single post pages.

Normally, I would recommend placing an opt-in on the top of the sidebar. However, because I am using persistant navigation with the Subscribe link in prime view at all times, I feel, for me, that this space is better used for lead generation.

The About page

I plan on doing something a little different by putting the link to my About (and other) pages in the footer. This is more like a news site, and less like other online marketing blogs.

Keeping that in mind, the people who come to the About page will need to do a little more digging to get there. So why don’t I try to capture an email address in the process, since we’re getting a little more personal?

This is what Derek says about the About page:

Prime people for your websiteís content and why it’s important

Opt-in form

Show social proof

Opt-in form

Show personal backstory

Opt-in form

For backstory, I plan to share a bit of my background as an actor, how I was fired over a pair of pants, how that eventually lead to online marketing, and the ups and downs I’ve seen while working for myself (there have been many).

Key takeaway:

When you address your users’ search intent first, then make a personal connection by sharing more about yourself, you give visitors more than one reason to subscribe.

What I’ll be testing:

The copy is what’s going to make the difference here. While it might not be a part of my initial relaunch plan, I’d also like to test using a cinematic “trailer” video that prompts visitors to “Join the journey” by becoming an email subscriber.

The footer

There’s a very simple reason for revamping the footer to include a subscription CTA. If someone’s scrolling to the bottom of the page, you can assume one of two things:

They’ve read through all of your content and are primed to want more.
They just like scrolling.

Either way, the footer is a great place to capture email, because your reader has gone all the way to the bottom of the page (and there’s nothing left to do).

Currently, I have an opt-in form in my footer, and it converts pretty well.

What’s lacking in this footer, and on my current site as a whole, for that matter, is a page that is dedicated to explaining the benefits of becoming a subscriber.

That’s why, instead of including an opt-in form in the new site footer, I will instead include a link to a landing page called Why Subscribe?

This again comes down to a matter of search intent. Where most of my content is going to be front-and-center in nearly aspect of the design, I can only suspect that the people who scroll to the bottom of the page are more “deep information” types.

I believe many blogs do not reward these types of people, and instead only go after those who are willing to hand over their information with little friction. However, the “deep information” types aren’t so trusting. They need to have all of the information before they give up any personal details. That’s ok with me, because they also do a good amount of homework before making purchases, and I’ve found to be the most-action oriented customers.

So instead of giving them nothing to do when they scroll to the bottom, I will give them a landing page that talks about all of the benefits of subscribing to the show. This page will include information on how frequently emails are sent, the types of bonus content they can expect, and an outline of what will be included. Doing this also gives me another page that can be linked to from internal content, which is a nice bonus!

Key takeaway:

Keep your users’ intent in mind, and create content that appeals to as many different types of readers as possible. If you don’t currently have some form of a “why subscribe” page on your site, you’re not addressing all of your readers’ concerns.

What I’ll be testing:

I’ll be interested to see the difference in conversion between the footer opt-in box and the Why Subscribe? link.

Giving users one extra click may decrease the overall conversions, however the link to the landing page is more in line with user intent on that particular section of the page.

Either way, I’ll have more data on footer and landing page subscribers, which will help me focus my follow-up messages even further.

End of single post pages
This is fairly straightforward. If someone has decided to take the time to read through the content, they’re probably a good candidate to become a subscriber. So I’ll create a subscription option at the end of every post.

Key takeaway:

We often clutter the end of our posts with all sorts of garbage, like related posts, share buttons, subscribe to my email list, read my bio, leave a comment, and more. Every single one of these commands is a call to action, and the more calls to action you have, the more diluted each one becomes. Find ways to incorporate all of these things—just don’t cram them all in at the end of your posts.

Using a WordPress plugin like Post Ender, you can keep your calls to action focused, and will likely see higher subscription rates from the ends of your posts.

What I’ll be testing:

Not much more than the language: “Subscribe,” for example, vs. “Keep Me Updated.” Because my content is primarily video, and it’s showcased at the top of the page, this form is one of the least of my concerns.

Email subscriber plan 4

This is it! The Dreaded Popup. I believe there’s a classy way to use popups, and an annoying way. You’re probably pretty familiar with the annoying way.

My plan with the popup, however, is to have it triggered after the viewer has been on the site for a given amount of time, or clicks within a set number of pages. That way, I’ll know they’re engaging with the site, and are more qualified than, say, a first time visitor.

Personally, I hate the pop-up, so if I’m finding that it’s not converting, even when I target mostly engaged users, I will not hesitate to yank it.

Key takeaway:

Popups can be extremely valuable, but are often seen as annoying. The longer people are on your site, the more likely they are to qualify as potential subscribers.

Although your conversion rates may go down the longer you wait to trigger the popup, your subscriber quality will increase, because they’ve already spent more time with you—they’re qualified subscribers.

What I’ll be testing:

Here, I’ll test headline copy, the optin orientation, click and time triggers, and a number of other things I exaplained in detail in this article.

Goal #3: Get more high-quality leads

Subscribers do not equal leads.

I repeat: subscribers do not equal leads. While subscribers may eventually become leads, signing up to be on your email list does not mean they have an interest in buying anything.

In order to gather more leads through the site, I intend to offer a free ebook titled Why Quality Matters, in which we’ll explore different statistics on the state of the internet, how high-quality content excels, what defines high-quality content, and so on/

The landing page to “sell” the book will follow this formula.

The book itself will follow a similar format, but remain informative throughout.

As it is ultimately a lead generation piece, the goal is to simultaneously attract the right people, and repel everyone else. Not everyone who reads the ebook will recognize themselves in it, but those who do will find a link to request a strategy session at the end of the book.

In the strategy request form, I ask questions of the reader, like how long they’ve been in business, their previous yearly income, target yearly income, and if there are any major roadblocks that prevent them from moving to the next level.

This process is designed to help a person really decide whether or not they need help. Having had my prospects step through a handful of filters also saves me a lot of trouble “pitching” my services to them. By the time we get on the strategy call, I can really focus on helping them. I do have an offer, but I’ll only make it if it seems like it’ll be a good fit.

Key takeaway:

Qualify your leads. So many bloggers and marketers assume that list subscribers = people who might be interested in buying something eventually. But every time a pitch comes around, a good chunk of people either unsubscribe or ignore you all together, causing this endless cycle of list rebuilding.

When you let people qualify themselves, and say “I need help,” they’re more likely to open your messages and take action on what you have to say.

What I’ll be testing:

I’ll test the landing page copy, without a doubt. Using Premise, I’ll be able to apply the Google Website Optimizer to test headline and copy variations. Also, I’ll be testing pure copy vs. video, to find out which will be the most effective “pitch” on the landing page. Even though the investment for users is “free”, I’ll still want to put my best foot forward, due to the subject matter and the eventual lead into the sale.

Note: This is not the only way I will be generating leads. Far from it actually. I’ll also use several paid and organic strategies to better target those exposed to my content.

I mention this because popular content marketing wisdom does not advocate paid advertising, but the truth is, there is no faster or more precise way to target the right people for your content.

Test, get feedback, iterate

The designs and tests above were all conceived to address gaps in my data. I cannot stress to you enough the importance of knowing what your analytics are telling you, and testing to make improvements.

One thing I’ve learned is that intuition doesn’t convert well. Yet data only tells you so much. That’s why I’ll offer an incentive to my list to get real people to “test drive” the site. Their feedback will be vital in making the necessary tweaks before I push the site live and test it with a larger audience. And even when it’s fully live, there will always be testing taking place.

The name of the game is to always be improving, and iterating on what you’ve learned from previous tests. Only let your data and user feedback drive your design. The next post in this series will show you how to set up, run, and adjust your own A/B tests.

I’m sure that by now, this series has probably encouraged you to look at your offer, conversion funnel, and offer communications more critically. You’ve probably come up with a few ideas you’d like to try. Share them with us in the comments below!

Tommy Walker is an Online Marketing Strategist and host of “Inside the Mind” a fresh and entertaining video show about Online Marketing Strategy.

Written on 5/28/2012 at 12:03 am by Guest Blogger

Secure Your WordPress Blog Without Touching Any Code

Filed Under: Miscellaneous Blog Tips

This guest post is by Karol K of ThemeFuse.

Right now WordPress powers 48 of the top 100 blogs online. More than that, WordPress actually powers 19% of the web as a whole.

Essentially, this is great. Such a strong community of users and developers means that the platform is sure to evolve even further and provide us with lots of cool features that are yet to be developed.

Unfortunately, this creates some dangers as well… Whenever there’s a big number of people trying to make something happen, there’s another group of people trying to take it all down.

The cases where a blog owner loses complete access to their site are not uncommon. Actually, sometimes even whole domains get hijacked, and I honestly have no idea on how that’s done.

But we don’t have to know how hijacking a domain or stealing a blog works to be able to implement some basic security precautions. And that is exactly what this post is about—making your blog secure without playing with source code, understanding things, and stuff.

Typical WordPress security problems

WordPress as a whole (a website management platform) is very well designed. It doesn’t have any preposterous security issues that beginning programmers could exploit. The problems, however, arise when you try to tweak your installation of WordPress by adding new plugins or themes, implementing hacks, or doing anything else that interferes with WordPress.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that you should settle for the default installation, not use any plugins, and only blog using the default theme. What it means is that you simply need to be careful when installing new stuff on your blog, as well as when setting up your blog for the first time.

Let’s start by discussing some of the common security problems you’ll need to handle.

The basics

Excuse me for being obvious, but you really need to start with proper usernames and passwords for your user accounts. Everyone realizes the importance of this, but not as many people implement the best practices.

You must use complex passwords—letters, numbers, special characters, spaces—and usernames that are not obvious. A password of “admin,” for example, is extra-obvious.

For more information on account security, see my recent guest post here on ProBlogger, which explained user accounts and roles, and how to set them up properly.

The name of the next problem in line: shady, untested plugins. WordPress plugins have a fair amount of power over how your WordPress installation works. If a plugin contains some buggy code, it can crash your blog completely. The same goes for code that’s not secure. Finally, if one of your plugins doesn’t implement any security features, it can become the point of entry for malicious bots or direct attacks by hackers.

Remember, the weakest link is where the chain breaks. You only need one low-quality plugin to get into trouble.

The advice I have here is: don’t use any plugin that hasn’t been updated in a while, or hasn’t been officially tested with the newest version of WordPress. Being up to date is always the best precaution. Also, plugins that are more popular are usually more secure as well.

There’s one more big issue we have to in terms of shady code, and that’s WordPress themes. I will say this again—and I’m not sorry for it—free themes are evil.

Well okay, not all of them. There are two kinds of free themes: (1) the good ones, released by quality theme stores as a way of attracting new customers by spreading one or two great free themes, (2) the evil ones made primarily to look great, attract many users, and use the space in the footer for SEO purposes.

These SEO-focused themes often use some strange, encrypted PHP code that can’t be removed, otherwise the theme stops working. This code usually displays search-optimized links (sometimes in an invisible font).

You never, let me repeat, never want to have encrypted code on your site. Even when you get the theme for free in exchange for hosting this encrypted section, it’s not worth it.

If you’re planning to use your WordPress site as the base of your online business then buying a quality theme is a must. If you have a bigger budget, you could even hire a developer to build your theme on top of some popular theme framework.

Since we’ve now covered the basics—user accounts, plugins, and themes—let’s look into some of the things that you can do to actively make your blog more secure.

Steps to better security

First, let’s talk through some of the best practices in terms of security. Then, let me show you some cool security plugins.

Hosting security

Yes, it all starts here. The story is similar to the one about WordPress themes: if you want to have a secure environment, you simply need to invest money. Don’t use free hosting.

Make sure that your web host implements basic security features and that it has good reviews among users (search on forums; Google is likely to display only affiliate reviews, which aren’t always credible).

Secure your own machine first

This is not something that comes to mind immediately when we’re talking WordPress security, is it? But what’s the point of securing your WordPress installation on the host if you have a malicious key-logger installed on your computer that will pick up your password and send it to the attacker?

You always need to start by securing the machine you’re using to connect with your WordPress blog. There are many good antivirus apps available, so I won’t discuss this any further. Just keep in mind that this issue is equally as important as anything else described in this post.

Update, update, update

Update WordPress. Update your plugins. Update your theme. Try to install these updates immediately after the alert apepars in your Dashboard.

Here’s why. Fixes to new bugs and security holes are always a big part of every update. The minute an update gets released, all the changes are announced in the official doc that goes along with the update.

If a hacker wants to attack a site that hasn’t been updated yet, they just have to take a look at the document, do a little research and tackle the holes that the new version fixes.

For example, here’s an excerpt from the information on the newest version of WordPress:

“WordPress 3.3.2 also addresses: Limited privilege escalation where a site administrator could deactivate network-wide plugins when running a WordPress network under particular circumstances, disclosed by Jon Cave of our WordPress core security team, and Adam Backstrom.”

Essentially, such information is a guide for hackers on how to attack outdated sites. So be sure to update everything, without delay.

Back up regularly

No one likes to get hacked, but we can’t assume that it won’t ever happen. You always should have an up-to-date backup of your WordPress site, just in case something goes wrong and you have to restore your blog.

You can do backups manually, or you can sign up to a paid service or simply get a plugin to do this for you (more on this later).

Delete plugins you don’t use

There’s no point in occupying your server’s resources with stuff you don’t use. The same advice applies to themes. Leave just the theme your blog uses, and delete the rest (you can leave the default theme, just in case).

Handy plugins to improve your blog’s security

Everybody loves them some cool plugins, right?! So here’s a list of the ones I recommend you use to make your blog more secure:

AntiVirus: This plugin protects your blog against exploits, malware, and spam injections. It scans your theme’s files and notifies you if anything suspicious is going on.
Online Backup for WordPress: This app is the one I use for my backups. You can use a schedule or perform backups by hand, and have them sent to your email address or made downloadable. The plugin backs up the database as well as the file system.
Secure WordPress: This is where you stop scanning and start acting! This plugin performs a number of security tweaks to your blog. There’s no point in listing them here, so I invite you to check for yourself. Also, you can choose which ones you want to enable and which you don’t need.
BulletProof Security: The list of things this plugin does is quite impressive. It’s a really serious piece of software. Just to name a few features: protection against XSS, RFI, CRLF, CSRF, Base64, Code Injection and SQL Injection hacking attempts, one-click htaccess protection, wp-config.php protection, and loads of other tweaks. It’s really worth looking into.
Hide Login: This plugin has a very simple idea behind it. You can use it to hide your login page. In other words, it creates a custom login URL. It also lets you create a custom admin URL (instead of domain.com/wp-admin), and a custom logout URL.

Other considerations

Content security

Your content is the most valuable asset on your blog. You naturally don’t want it to get stolen by some evil content scrapers and SEO marketers who just want to launch thousands of sites with content from various RSS feeds.

Unfortunately, you can’t protect against this completely. There’s always a danger that someone can steal your content and republish it without attribution. But you can make it just a little harder, or at least let everyone know that your content is protected.

Try checking Copyscape. It’s a service that searches for copies of your content around the internet. If it finds some, you get an alert and some instructions on how to get it taken down. Copyscape offers a couple of different services, so it’s good to pay them a visit and choose one that suits you best.

The just-in-case approach

No matter what you do to protect your blog, something bad is always possible. That’s why you need to have a strategy set in place for the time when something goes wrong, and you need to act fast.

I invite you to check out two of my own: how to restore your blog after a crash, and what to do when you lose access to your blog. And I truly hope that you’ll never have to use either of these guides.

How secure is your blog?

There you have it. I think that’s it when it comes to securing your WordPress site without going into code and implementing various tweaks manually. There’s always a never-ending stream of things you can do, but if you take care of just the ones described here you’ll have a pretty secure blog, and you’ll be ready in case something bad happens.

How diligent are you when it comes to your blog’s security? And what security tweaks would you add to this list?

Karol K. is a 20-something year old web 2.0 entrepreneur from Poland and a writer at ThemeFuse.com, where he shares various WordPress advice. Currently, he’s working on a new e-book titled “WordPress Startup Guide – little known things worth doing when creating a WordPress site.” The e-book launches soon, and now the best part … it’s free. Also, don’t forget to visit ThemeFuse to get your hands on some premium WordPress themes.

Written on 5/24/2012 at 6:07 am by Guest Blogger

Use Email to Post to Your WordPress.org Blog

Filed Under: Blogging Tools and Services

This guest post is by Anurag Bansal of Techacker.

Owners of WordPress.org blogs don’t get the flexibility to post by email through a WordPress service. It’s very surprising to see that such a popular platform doesn’t offer a native way of creating blog post by sending an email—especially since WordPress.com owners can update their blogs using native WordPress functionality.

If you have a blog on Tumblr or Posterous (which was recently acquired by Twitter), you know how convenient it is to update your blog using email. It naturally increases the frequency with which you update your blog.

Today I’m going to introduce you to an easy way to post by email to your WordPress.org blog using a service I am a big fan of—ifttt.

ifttt stands for If This, Then That. This service, which was introduced recently on ProBlogger, makes it really easy to do many online tasks, some of which are mentioned below.

How to post by email to a WordPress.org blog

Create an ifttt account if you don’t already have one.
Activate and authorize the WordPress.org blog you want to post by email to. To do this, click on WordPress logo under Channels on ifttt. Then add the appropriate details to authorize your WordPress blog to use with ifttt. Once activated, you will see a similar screen to the one shown below.
Activate the email channel connection to the email account from which you’d like to send posts. All you need is to click on Email icon and enter your email address. ifttt will immediately send a PIN to this email address. Copy that PIN from the email into the box on ifttt. Once your account’s confirmed, you’ll have successfully activated the email channel.
Use this recipe to create a task. While creating the task, you can edit the details shown in the screenshot below to suit your needs.
Once the task is activated, all you have to do is send an email from the email account you confirmed in Step 3 to [email protected] with the specified # tag in the subject line. In ifttt terms, that tag says, “if email is received from the account specified earlier, then post it to the WordPress blog set up earlier.”
ifttt will create a post on your WordPress.org blog, using the email details as follows:
1. The subject of the email becomes the title of the blog post.
2. The body of the email becomes the content of the blog post.
3. Tags for the post are specified in the recipe. You can change these in the task details on ifttt.
4. Categories for the post are also specified by you in the ifttt recipe.

There are many other recipes I use to update my WordPress.org blog, including:

I have been able to successfully post many updates to my blog using this process. It’s easy, painless and quick. All it takes to update your blog is an email!

Stop postponing that great blog post idea just because you didn’t have the right tools at the time. Now, there’s no need to install any plugins—just use email.

How do you update your WordPress blog now? Do you think email updates would make it easier for you to update your blog? If you’re already using emil updates on another platform, is it helpful? Let us know in the comments.

Anurag Bansal is a technology enthusiasts and internet addict. He reviews various internet services, Android and iPhone apps and provide tips on many technology related topics on his blog at Techacker. Anurag also releases a FREE Monthly Magazine - THM - on his blog. You may follow him on Twitter and Facebook.

Written on 5/23/2012 at 6:03 am by Guest Blogger

How to SEO Your Blog Post Series

Filed Under: Writing Content

This guest post is by Keith Bishop of Online Digital Junkie.

Google’s Panda Update, as well as the recent post from Darren about hosting a guest post series, has prompted me to take a deeper look into the implementation and search benefits associated with putting series on my own sites.

What I found tells me that publishing a series can be a good move if it’s done correctly. So let’s look at when a series is a good idea, as well as some of the issues that need to be avoided for the optimal search performance of the series you publish.

When to use a series

A series is best used when you have a lot of material and media that would slow your page load time if you published it all in one article. Long load times can have a negative effect on your search ranking, as well as causing users to hit the Back button before your post ever finishes loading.

You can check page download speeds on sites like Pingdom. My personal goals are to have all of my main landing pages load with 1.5 seconds, and the rest no longer than two seconds.

Another great time to use series is if you find a group of posts on your site that have similar content with overlapping keywords. This scenario causes your own pages to compete with each other and suffer in search rank. Under these circumstances it would be beneficial to rework your content into a series and allow it to build upon itself. The result of this, as I will explain later, will harness all of the combined SEO benefits and push your series up in the SERP.

The last, and probably most applicable, reason to publish series is when you have a lengthy subject that you are covering over an extended period of time. I certainly don’t want to read a 10,000 word article on the same subject—or have it delivered to my email. Everyone needs a little variety.

The negative aspects of series

Series have their downsides, as far as usability and search rank go. The worst part is the increased load time that the user experiences while navigating to each article, instead of having it load all at once on a single page. Most of the time, this is a good trade-off—the only exception being a long text article which will likely load quickly as a single post, and won’t benefit from being split into parts.

Another issue arises when the middle or last part of the series ranks better in the search results than the first part, and that becomes the landing page for search users. This is sort of like showing a guest your home by walking them through the garage first, and it’s something you want to avoid. The solution? Optimizing your series navigation.

How to link your series for greatest SEO and usability

Proper linking is accomplished by using the [link] element in the [head] section of the post page. This hints to Google that the page is part of a series, and also indicates the position of the document within the series.

To accomplish page ordering, we use the [rel=”prev” and rel=”next”] attributes that in the [link] pagination. This will ensure that the first part of your series will almost always be the one to show up in the search results. Note, though, that Google says “almost always” when it discusses this, so there must be occasions where the search engine likes an article deeper in the series for some reason.

Pagination is easy in WordPress, and there are probably some short codes for the other content management systems that will make it easy to implement in those as well.

Let’s imagine that you want to publish all the material in a series at once. All you need to do in WP is to put the entire series of articles into one post, then add [] wherever you want to break the content up into separate pages or parts. You can then modify the look of your pagination links with CSS.

If you want to drip-feed your series to users over an extended period of time—perhaps in weekly installments—use a head injection plugin that will allow you to add the [] information to the series manually as you publish each article.

A good WordPress plugin that takes care of this is HiFi (Head injection / Foot injection).

Hand-coded blogs will need to have this information added manually into the head section. Here is an example of what the code looks like.

<head>

<title>Your Page Title</title>

</head>

Naturally, the first page in the series will not have a [prev] attribute and the last page will not have a [next] attribute. This is how the search bots know where the series starts and ends. Clickable navigation links will also need to be coded at the end of each article in the series.

The most beneficial reason to use the [prev/next] attributes is that the search engines will count the series as one article and funnel all the SEO benefits from the series through to the page that’s shown in the search results.

This means that all of the likes, G+, tweets, and links back from the entire series will count together, instead of competing with one another. I don’t know about you, but that gets me excited.

What not to do

You may still find information about this online, but what you do not want to do is link your series using the [rel=”canonical”] attribute on your links.

This method will prevent the wrong post (e.g. a later part in a series) from ranking higher than the one you wanted (the first part in the series), but it also tells the search engine that this is duplicate content and it shouldn’t be indexed. The canonical attribute was used in the past under a slightly different set of circumstances, and is no longer applicable to series.

Too bad there isn’t some way to certify our content so that we could get the SEO benefits from our content when it gets scraped or syndicated. That would be awesome, but it is likely a dream for another day…

Keith currently writes for Beauty & Bandaids and is currently obsessed with his new outdoor adventure watch. Watch obsession to new blog is OCD at its finest.

Written on 5/15/2012 at 12:09 am by Guest Blogger

Install Your First WordPress Theme

Filed Under: Blog Networks

This guest post is by Karol K of ThemeFuse.

Seeing a headline like “How to Install a WordPress Theme” on ProBlogger might seem strange at first. This doesn’t sound like a “pro”-thing at all, right? If you’ve been dealing with WordPress for a while then this is probably even more than obvious to you.

However, everyone starts somewhere, and there are plenty of experienced bloggers who haven’t ever installed a WordPress theme—but would like to give it a try. Maybe you’re installing your first theme right now, and you’re searching for a quick guide on how to do it.

Where can you get a good WordPress theme?

This is tricky. You see, when you’re installing a plugin the best place to go is the official directory at wordpress.org. When you’re installing a theme, however, the official theme directory is not the best place to go, I’m afraid.

Of course, you can find some interesting themes there, but you’re more likely to make your search much more fruitful if you just go to Google.

The thing with the official directory is that it only contains 1,490 themes or so. This is by no means the total number of themes available on the internet. There’s much much more interesting stuff out there, and settling for what you can find in the official directory would not be a wise thing to do.

Yesterday, I described how to select a theme that’s perfect for you and your blog. So here I will just assume that you already know which theme you want to use.

Step 1. Download the theme

Once you find a theme you like, you’ll need to download it to your computer before you can do anything else with it.

The package containing your theme can consist of many various elements. Depending on the license you’ve selected, you might find some PSD files, additional bonuses, documents, and so on. Of course, the theme files themselves will be present as well. Most of the time, all the contents of a theme are delivered as a ZIP archive.

2. Extract the files

Next, you have to extract the archive somewhere—onto your desktop, for example. If the archive contains more elements than just the theme (like the bonuses I mentioned above), open the archive’s readme file to locate the main theme’s directory.

As an example, here’s what you’ll find inside a ThemeFuse theme archive:

Once you’ve successfully identified the main theme directory, you can proceed to the next step.

3. Upload the theme to your WordPress blog

This step will require FTP access to your hosting account, and a piece of FTP software. You can try FileZilla—it’s good, and it’s free.

The theme’s main directory is the one you’ll be uploading to your blog. Connect to your site via FTP (the FTP tool’s help documentation will explain how to do this if you’re not sure) and navigate to the wp-content/themes directory of your site. This is where you upload your theme’s main directory.

Here’s the default look of the directory when it contains only one theme—the default theme TwentyEleven:

The next step in the process takes place in your WordPress Admin panel.

4. Activate your new theme

Installing new themes requires Admin access rights; it can’t be done through other types of accounts.

Go to Appearance > Themes, as shown here:

Your new theme should be visible among all the others. The only thing left for you to do now is activate it:

If everything goes well, your new theme will be marked as the Current Theme, and your blog will have an entirely new look.

5. All done!

This is where the guide ends. There’s nothing more for you to do now other than enjoy your new theme! Of course, you could make some final adjustments to make your blog look truly unique, for instance, adding branding elements such as your logo, pictures, and so on. Or, if you’re ready to install a WordPress plugin, we have a guide to that, too!

Have you installed a WordPress theme yet? Share your tips with us in the comments.

Written on 5/9/2012 at 6:01 am by Guest Blogger

5 Unexpected Benefits of Adding Podcasts to Your Blog

Filed Under: Writing Content

This guest post is by Carol Tice of Make a Living Writing.

Are you having trouble keeping your blog readers interested in what you have to say?

If interest is waning, it may be time to add some variety to what you’re giving readers, besides just writing blog posts, week after week.

Back in July 2011, I started doing monthly live training events for participants in my membership community, which I record. Then, I began editing down short excerpts from those hour-long events and using them as blog posts. I’d write a short intro, and then just let people listen to a short podcast of five minutes or so.

Free software such as Audacity and free webcasting platforms such as Anymeeting make it easy to record your voice and create short audio trainings for your audience.

If you’re on WordPress, the Audio Player plug-in also makes it super-easy to install a podcast right inside a blog post. All of which definitely helped me, since I’m not technically gifted.

In short, if you’re intimidated by adding video interviews to your site—maybe you don’t feel you’d make an attractive, poised talking head?—podcasting can be a great way to go.

Adding podcasts achieved my goal of helping me keep readers and grow my subscriber base—I added about 1,000 new subscribers in the first six months after I began podcasting.

But I’ve gotten much more from podcasting than a bigger, more engaged readership. I discovered there are some powerful fringe benefits of podcasting, too. Here are five unexpected benefits of podcasting.

1. Stand out from the crowd

Instantly, when you add podcasts, you have separated yourself from the unwashed masses of bloggers. You’ve got more going on than most—you have tasty audio recordings people can listen to. Since some people learn best through listening rather than reading, you can capture another segment of readers who might otherwise might not be interested in your blog.

2. Make useful new friends

Most good podcasts aren’t one person talking, but two or more. I’ve found that as a podcaster, you can approach nearly anyone about appearing, and many top bloggers will agree. Once you’ve featured them on your recording, it’s often the start of a deeper relationship that may lead to any number of additional interactions, including your guest posting on their blog.

Since hosting them on my podcasts, I have appeared on the blogs of many of my podcast guests including Renegade Writer Linda Formichelli and Successful Blogging’s Annabel Candy.

Many A-listers may not have time to give you a written guest post, but you can post their podcast or an excerpt of it on your blog, effectively turning your well-known guest into a guest poster on your own blog.

3. Create products

Every time you create a recording, you have a new product in your hands. There are myriad ways you can make use of this valuable property, including:

Offer it as a premium freebie for your blog subscribers.
Offer it as a bonus when readers do an earlybird purchase of your paid product.
Offer it as a bonus when readers buy an affiliate product through your link.
Bundle it with other recordings on similar topics to create a free or paid online audio course.
Get it transcribed and turn it into an ebook.
Use it as part of the content for members of a member community platform.

4. Get interviewed

Once you have audio samples of how great you sound doing audio podcasts, it positions you as a strong candidate for being interviewed on others’ podcasts. For instance, I ended up featured on Blogcast.fm. This can help expose you to new audiences and also bring in more readers.

5. Gain affiliate opportunities

I believe my podcasting success led to my receiving several offers from top bloggers to affiliate-sell their lucrative products. These were situations where only a handful of affiliates were given the opportunity. I made over $2,500 selling just one of them.

How does podcasting help here? Bloggers know one of the best ways to get readers interested in a paid product is to first offer them some valuable training in a related topic through—you guessed it—a live podcast or Webinar. With demonstrated podcasting experience and an audience that’s been trained to consume live information, you’re in a better position to get these sorts of exclusive affiliate-sales offers.

How are you keeping readers interested in your blog? Leave a comment and let us know.

Carol Tice writes and podcasts on the Make a Living Writing blog, and serves as Den Mother of the writers’ learning and support community Freelance Writers Den.

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